In the pitch black, geometric tapestries and flickering, blue-green kaleidoscopic flowers begin to bloom across my visual field. The night is dense, humid, alive with jungle sounds. A tarantula scuttles along the wide boards of the round open-air hall. Crickets click in time to the curandero’s rattle. Far off in the trees, a bird whistles an eerie harmony with his song. I try to sit up straight, surfing waves of nausea. I went up for my serving of medicine about an hour ago, trying to steady my breath as I accepted the tin shot glass of bitter brew. Drinking it is the hardest part, I tell myself. After that, it’s out of your hands. 

Now, an hour later, the medicine is taking hold and I sense with mounting dread that this is going to be one of those “challenging” ceremonies. A “bad trip,” if you will. Fear slithers up my throat and gathers storm clouds in my temples. What is this interminable coldness, this aspect of myself that seems hellbent on separateness, loneliness, emptiness? Is this part always here, inside me? I look blankly into a crackling black void. It feels like I am meeting all the existential dread and psychosis of the human animal, the very source of all war, violence, planetary destruction, and addiction— but I can’t even shed a tear. My heart is a frozen rabbit quaking under the fierce eye of a predator. I am numb to the unrelenting wash of terror.

Time passes: seconds or hours I couldn’t say. Suddenly, my brain feels heavy. Then (thank god) I vomit into a plastic bucket. The purge. Much feared but ultimately a relief. I don’t know what this darkness is inside me but I know it needs to come up and out. I hear the voice of my friend Jess saying, “Remember what you told me: you trust that you’ll always come home to yourself.” I hold tight to the lifeline of these words. Blessedly, an hour or so after my purge I begin to come down. There’s no overt meeting with God, no message of love underneath the horror. The only thing I feel is grateful to be back in my body in the sacred plane of the Ordinary. I will never drink ayahuasca ever again, I tell myself, with three ceremonies still ahead of me. (Spoiler, I ended up drinking at all of those ceremonies.) Later that night, I will weep in the arms of a dear teacher and start to feel it all and the meaning-making will begin to touch down softly, like a cleansing rain.

In my inner dialogue, I’ve been referring to that night as the Dark Ceremony. I spoke two prayers during it, over and over. One: “It’s a round trip ticket.” Two: “Return to the Land of the Living.” The first meaning, the medicine will take you far afield but (god-willing) always bring you back. The second: no matter how dark the road, it’s your job to find a way back to the light. Me and the medicine, we’re journeying in the Underworld. There’s something important to see there. And, it is essential that I remember the sweetness and purity and fire of this life. Choose the Land of the Living.

It’s natural to fear these kinds of ceremonies, and even wonder why someone would drink ayahuasca in the first place if psychedelic trauma is a potential outcome. That concern is more than fair. But the thing is, I am familiar with the Land of the Dead, and my knowledge of it started long before I met any plant medicine. I believe we’re all subconsciously entering into the subterranean realms of sleepwalking, pain, and insanity more often than we think. For example:

During the Dark Ceremony I was reminded of the Underworld realm that is fighting with my partner, times when I’ve been so stuck in my own masochistic desire to be right that I can’t connect to the love beneath it all, times where I’m trapped in a dark vortex in which it feels impossible to reach out and say, “I see my part in this.” I remembered a moment of disdain and coldness towards one of my fellow journeyers, despite his perfect sweetness towards me. I remembered my decades-long relationship with disordered eating and addiction to various substances. The mania of needing to modulate my reality in order to tolerate it. These behaviors are journeys to the Underworld, slips into temporary (or longterm, if we’re not careful) insanity.

Two weeks out from the Dark Ceremony, I didn’t think that night would be the one I’d write about. During my twelve days in the central Peruvian Amazon, I was blessed to experience magical light-filled ceremonies where the medicine showed me nothing but beauty and afterlife and ethereal infinite forests populated by angels and ancestors. But this morning I started typing and the Underworld poured out of me, begging to be integrated. I don’t yet know what the Dark Ceremony “means”— and may never know with my thinking mind— but it’s the one that, right now, is feeling most applicable to my daily life, with important teachings to glean and integrate. As my partner and I navigate the richness and discomfort of international travel together, there are myriad opportunities to slide unconsciously into the Underworld.

“Why are we here?”

“We’re wasting our money.”

“I’m sick of Peruvian food.”

“Why does everything I eat go right through me?”

“Speaking Spanish all the time is hard.”

“Did I get fleas from that street dog in Pucallpa who jumped on my yoga mat?”

Picking unnecessary fights about how fast/slow we’re walking.

Rushing out of a taxi to dry heave on steep cobblestones smeared with dog shit and ash while the traffic lays mercilessly on their horns.

Getting change from a fruit stand and later finding out it’s in fake bills.

The lesson from the Dark Ceremony is that such moments are a crossroads where we can descend deeper into an insanity of our own making (I think of Eckhardt Tolle’s “pain body”) or do our best to slog towards the Land of the Living. On this trip, we’ve often been reminded that one way to get there is through laughter. On our last day backpacking the Inka Trail, Jackson and I were afflicted by violent gastrointestinal trials. After waking up at 3am to hike to Machu Picchu by headlamp, we were forced to stop to poop trailside a total of 30 times collectively.

What was supposed to be a triumphant descent from multiple 15k foot passes into this mind-blowing archeological wonder was turned into a seemingly endless walk where all I could think about was sitting the f*ck down on the bus back to Cusco and drinking a Mexican coke. We also laughed more that day than any other day on the trip so far, cracking up at our feeble near-fainting steps up the steep Inka stairs and our search for the ideal jungle “toilet paper” in the form of huge equatorial leaves. The absurdity and expectation and meltdown of it all had me leaning on my trekking poles in side-splitting giggles. Through laughter, we were able to stay close to our hearts and each other that day.

Ayahuasca hasn’t changed me forever into a levitating love-and-light priestess. If anything, she is helping me see the inherent humility and pain of being a human. She’s also teaching me that it’s within my power to make daily redirects towards grace, however small. By intentionally going into the Underworld with medicine, I feel more equipped to catch myself when I’m sinking under in the everyday.